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Reports: Some of the Hamas Terrorists Had Israeli Work Permits and Their Victims Recognized Them
By Matt Vespa
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Israel’s Challenge In Responding To A Brutal Surprise Attack by Andrew Roberts, David Petraeus via The Wall Street Journal Hamas staged a shockingly successful operation against the Jewish state, but history shows that wars are seldom won by such tactics. |
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By Gregg Roman (director of the Middle East Forum.)
The most recent Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians have shocked the civilized world. Terrorists went house to house hunting Jews, murdering them, kidnapping them, and setting houses on fire. Hamas massacred more than 100 Israelis at Kibbutz Be'eri alone. The total death toll, as of this writing, is more than 900 Israelis murdered.
It is impossible not to conclude that Oct. 7, 2023, was the darkest day in Israeli history. It marked the largest loss of Jewish life in one day since the Holocaust.
It is impossible not to conclude that Oct. 7, 2023, was the darkest day in Israeli history. It marked the largest loss of Jewish life in one day since the Holocaust.
When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinians could have chosen a peaceful route. Instead, Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, decided to turn the territory into a warren of terror tunnels, focusing more on the procurement and development of rockets than the needs of Gaza residents. Hamas, a genocidally antisemitic organization intent on Israel's destruction, is more interested in terrorizing Israel than it is in Gazans' welfare. In July of this year, thousands of dissatisfied Gazans took to the streets to protest Hamas's poor governance.
There is no possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians so long as Hamas remains in power.
Previous Israeli operations, launched in response to Hamas rocket fire, have consisted of aerial strikes in Gaza and short-lived ground assaults. After the horrific attacks of Oct. 7, this strategy of keeping terror at bay will no longer work. Israeli policy should follow the statement of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: "This phenomenon will not continue. We will change reality on the ground in Gaza for the next 50 years. What was before will be no more. We will operate at full force."
It is imperative that Israel undertake a campaign to cripple Hamas's ability to wage war and its capacity to govern. The United States should support Israel in its efforts to extirpate Hamas and prevent efforts to impose premature ceasefires and other interventions that will inevitably crop up.
It is imperative that Israel undertake a campaign to cripple Hamas's ability to wage war and its capacity to govern.
It must be emphasized that Hamas does not operate in a vacuum, nor do its funds appear from thin air. Hamas's rule is underwritten to a large extent by Qatar, the tiny, oil-rich sheikhdom in the Persian Gulf, among others. Beginning in 2018, Qatar delivered funds in cash to Gaza to the tune of $30 million a month. Per an arrangement reached in May 2021, after a conflict between Israel and Hamas, Qatar began to send fuel (valued at between $7-$10 million per month) to Gaza via Egypt, freeing funds for Hamas from the proceeds of resale.
These were used to pay Hamas government salaries as well as to aid poor Gazans, but it is likely that a significant majority wound up financing terrorist activities. Qatar also pledged $500 million to help rebuild Gaza.
Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's leader, resides in Doha, Qatar's capital. So, too, does Khaled Mashal, who preceded Haniyeh as the terrorist organization's leader and now serves as his second-in-command. Khalil al-Hayyah, who had served as the deputy of Yahya Sinwar (Hamas's leader in Gaza), also decamped to Doha. Other leading Hamas officials live in Qatar as well.
Qatar is unsavory in other ways, bribing FIFA for the honor of hosting the 2022 World Cup and then using slave labor to build the necessary stadiums in the brutal desert heat. The family of Steven Sotloff, an American journalist who was executed by ISIS, alleged in a federal lawsuit in 2022 that Qatar Charity and Qatar National Bank had wired $800,000 to the ISIS official who ordered the beheading of Sotloff and James Foley, another American journalist.
Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's leader, resides in Doha, Qatar's capital. So, too, does Khaled Mashal, who preceded Haniyeh as the terrorist organization's leader and now serves as his second-in-command.
Like Iran, Qatar blamed Israel entirely for Hamas's onslaught. Qatar's foreign ministry stated, "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs holds Israel solely responsible for the ongoing escalation due to its ongoing violations of the rights of the Palestinian people, the latest of which was the repeated incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque under the protection of the Israeli police."
The canard about the Al-Aqsa Mosque is straight out of the Hamas propaganda playbook, following in the footsteps of the ferociously pro-Nazi Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini. The terrorist attacks of Oct. 7 were conducted under the name "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood." Qatar's pro-Hamas stance couldn't be clearer.
The Biden administration designated Qatar a major non-NATO ally in 2022. Congress should persuade the administration to take the opposite tack and designate Qatar as a state sponsor of terrorism, as well as pressure the Qatari government to extradite Hamas commanders to face justice. The blood of the victims of this week's terrorist attacks cries out for no less.
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The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself
By Bret Stephens
On Saturday morning in southern Israel, Hamas murdered hundreds of people at a music festival and kidnapped others at gunpoint to serve as human shields in Gaza. On Sunday afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, a speaker at a rally of pro-Palestinian and left-wing groups celebrated that atrocity — one of thousands suffered by Israelis over the past few days, which we later learned included the killing of babies and toddlers.
“As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” a speaker said. “But I’m sure they’re doing very fine despite what The New York Post says.” He was met with cheers.
I went to see the rally for myself: Would there be even perfunctory condemnation of Hamas’s methods? A brief nod of sympathy to Israel’s anguish? Some banal nod to the cause of peace and nonviolence? Not that I heard. What I saw was giddiness and gloating, as if someone’s team had won the World Cup. Hamas had perpetrated the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the crowd was euphoric.
Similar scenes unfolded across the world. In London, an estimated 5,000 demonstrators gathered near the Israeli embassy and shot off fireworks toward the building. At a rally at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, chants of “Free Palestine” gave way to the underlying emotion: “Fuck the Jews.” At Harvard, almost three dozen campus groups issued a joint statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” A statement from Yalies4Palestine insisted that “Breaking out of a prison requires force, not desperate appeals to the colonizer.”
Whatever else might be said about these demonstrations and declarations, give the protesters and manifesto writers points for honesty. “Pro-Palestine,” to many of them, is pro-Hamas. “Anti-occupation” is opposition to Israel’s right to exist in any form. Israelis are guilty by virtue of being Israelis, so their murder and humiliation is something to laugh at. When “Zionism Is Genocide,” as placards at the demonstration put it, then no means are too awful to put a stop to it.
If twice as many Israelis had been murdered on Saturday, would it have chastened the demonstrators or made them doubly glad, by the algorithm in which the terminally self-righteous become cheerleaders for slaughter?
Not all the far left was quite as far gone. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America had promoted the rally on social media, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group’s most prominent member, denounced the rally and issued a 66-word statement in which she condemned “Hamas’s attack in the strongest possible terms.”
That was followed by a demand for “an immediate cease-fire and de-escalation.” Someone should tell the New York congresswoman: To call for a cease-fire, now, is to shield the killers from consequences and deny their victims the right to effective self-defense. It is, in the language of the old left, “objectively” pro-Hamas, even as it masquerades as a call for peace.
Something similar must be said about a much broader swath of the left that looks in heartfelt horror at what happened on Saturday but rarely stops to wonder whether it played any role in creating the moral and intellectual climate for what has unfolded.
I’m talking about the bien-pensant for whom anti-Zionism — not just legitimate opposition to various aspects of Israeli policy, but the denial of Israel’s right to exist in any form — is a respectable political position, rather than simply an updated form of antisemitism. I’m talking about United Nations rapporteurs and once-great human-rights organizations who traffic in the lie that Israel deliberately created an “open-air prison” in Gaza, never mind that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, or that Israel vacated the territory nearly 20 years ago only to be repaid by endless assaults from above and below the ground.
I’m talking about the university presidents who stand for free speech when it comes to anti-Semitism but become notably censorious when it comes to other forms of controversial speech. I’m talking about the political leaders who repeatedly promise solidarity with Israel only to quickly demand restraint when Israel seeks to destroy the infrastructure by which Hamas maintains its war machine. I’m talking about narratives that seem calibrated to create the outrageous impression that Israeli soldiers deliberately kill Palestinian children. I’m talking about the people whose fury at the Israeli government never seems to abate but who barely pause to observe that Hamas is a dictatorship of religious zealots or that President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority is a fulminating anti-Semite.
Taken separately, none of this directly threatens a single Israeli life. Taken together, it goes far to explain how Israel, the nation of the Jews, is routinely treated, as some have said, like “the Jew of nations,” with consequences spelled in blood. If some of the anti-Israel left find themselves looking on in horror at what happened on Saturday, now is a good time for them to take a long, hard look at themselves.
Bret Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
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https://www.visualcapitalist.Republicans refuse to select a Speaker. Obviously, they prefer to continue being independent losers than being co-ordinated winners. Even Jordan, Scalises' challenger, after losing, threw his support to Scalise and they still avoid coalescing.
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